Before he became an internationally famous novelist, Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist, amateur and professional. Upon arrival in the US he volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and while teaching literature at Wellesley he was also employed as curator of the lepidopterological collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He wrote a number of journal articles, and continued butterfly collecting expeditions well after his career shift. Although he was recognized as a competent taxonomist, he was not formally trained, he was nowhere near as prolific as would be expected of a career scientist, and his work tilted more toward sorting through details than grand theorizing. So his classification of South and Central American Blue butterflies, published as Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae in 1943, slipped into obscurity.

This book focuses on two tasks: resurrecting Nabokov’s reputation and legacy as a scientist, and picking up where he left off with the Blues. I was most engaged by the chapters about Nabokov, biographical with an emphasis on science in its journalistic and literary manifestations. Nabokov was embedded in the science of the times, and aware of the cutting edge; in Notes, he applied modern techniques of anatomical (not merely wing pattern) comparison, and speculated on evolutionary origins. With a mere 120 specimens from museum collections, he proposed a general classification scheme, anticipating that butterflies found in the future could be placed within it. And he was right in all essentials. Author Kurt Johnson is a lepidopterist whose attention was elsewhere in the 1980s when new discoveries of Blues prompted him to revisit Nabokov’s work. This component of the book is rather inside lepidoptery, as an international team of researchers is brought together and specimens from museum and field are studied. It is probably more compelling to people who are more familiar with the professional terminology than I, but with no qualms about skimming over esoteric passages I was informed and entertained by the difficulties of simply collecting a sufficient variety of butterflies for meaningful analysis, ranging from tedious examination of museum storage drawers packed with poorly labeled specimens, to adventures in barely accessible terrain with success dependent on cooperative weather. Highly recommended for the butterfly enthusiast with literary inclinations.

This took me a little while to get through because it’s about a subject that I know very little about (I majored in biology, but all my classes were molecular in nature)–butterfly taxonomy. I really could care less about insect genitalia since my bias towards any sort of classification is more towards genomic comparisons rather than painstaking morphological scrutiny, but I think the authors have succeeded in making what might have been a coma-inducing subject interesting. The highlight: an action-packed account of one of Johnson’s colleagues dodging guerrillas in Central America just to bag some elusive and rare butterflies.

My review:

http://www.free-times.com/archive/coverstorarch/litsup0600/nabokov.html ( )